—You’re not under contract, I say, wanting it again, the flash, the real Z.
—I wouldn’t do that to you, he says, all control. I’m here for you no matter what.
—But you don’t owe me anything, I say.
The months I didn’t ask him to visit hang between us, unspoken of. I watch his Adam’s apple as he swallows, an opportunity opening and closing in the same instant.
—Jesus, Elena, I hope you find God—or, fuck it, the Buddha in all your empty space. That’s all you fucking want.
He looks out the window. I can’t see his face.
—I’m sorry, he says. It’s just—I remember things you don’t. …
He is ready to remind me of promises we made during months only he remembers. He doesn’t say more, but his familiar stories are evoked anyway, having left their impressions. I take a sip of rosé, which tastes watery. In conversations over the last months, I had only Z’s voice (rarely a pixelated image, since he prefers the phone). Now I stare at lids low across large dark eyes that refuse to look at me full on.
—I don’t get why you left, he says, still angry, why you gave up on your work, your father, everything—me—to try to make sense of some other girl’s life. I’ve tried. I don’t get it.
He wants a reason.
I think of Siobhán and my mother, of the pictures from Beaune. How to explain that the journals felt important, offering something I needed, or needed to learn?
—I thought I would find Ella, I say, cringing at how ridiculous it sounds.
—No, you didn’t, Z says coldly. You were never going to find someone missing for six years by reading her diary. And didn’t you say yourself she was insane?
The word is too blunt, too harsh.
—I’m sorry, Z says hurriedly.
—I understand her.
—I don’t, Z says, bitterness returning to his voice.
—She just felt things too much. After a point, she couldn’t tell what was coming from her and what from outside her. It could happen to anyone.
—Oh, Z says, his eyes widening. Like your mom.
He comes over, takes my glass, and cups his hands around my elbows, the way he used to.
—Ella’s story is not yours, he says. It’s a fallacy to think she can help you. By the same token, her death shouldn’t scare you.
I want to tell him again that the best things aren’t logical. We just need logic so we can talk to one another. But Ella’s story hasn’t unlocked anything. I’ve learned that my mother was in love, charismatic, adored—and almost nothing about my own life.
—All I have from those months is what you tell me, I say.
He understands my fear, that these months of dissociation link me to her (also to Ella).
—There is nothing, not even a smell or a light. I was tired of not knowing. I thought that by helping someone else, I could at least stop thinking about it. Then, through Ella, I could feel things. I had dreams—
—Dreams like the one in the Loire? Z asks sharply.
His concern sends chills through me. He brushes the hair back from my face.
—You should try not to worry so much about the missing months, he says reasonably. Maybe your mind will give them back to you when you’re ready for them.
We sit down on the edge of the bed and a trembling begins in my arms. Z notices. I force my mind back over the hole in memory. It’s like licking my lips. Evening in December, train from New York, where I was living, Union Station, then metro, walking with the bulky portfolio—my photographs to show my mother—I’d come home a week early. The cold and the dark, lit houses, it’s all there, vivid and clear. Then lying in a field with Z in hot sun, asking him what day it was and how we got there. His cautious regard, his surprise: You’re back.
I press harder, forcing the locks of forgetting, knocking at my mother’s studio. It was a converted barnlike space beside the house, probably once used as a garage; an old car smell layered itself among the woods, resins, and clays. I remember seeing the dim lights across the yard through her small, high windows. She was working on a collage of wood, metal, and glass; we’d talked about it over the phone. Tightness in my chest as I reached for the door—then Z and that vivid green field. When it became clear how little I remembered, he told me what happened; he cried. I want scenes from that time to stretch into focus, glitch, and then clear. But there is only the field of bright grass and yellow flowers I still don’t know how to name. Z the same as ever: I saw “you” again in your eyes. You asked when it was, where you were. You were you.
My first days of memory were as painful as any I can remember. The tragedy came on fresh each day. I’d wake to its reality, shame compounded by the memory of having done the same the day before. I’d look for her, then realize. My body was the same, except thinner, cheeks gaunt, hair longer than I usually wore it. The hair on my eyebrows had grown in. Was it a different self, living those months? My nails were well groomed, short. There was the eerie pressure of time having passed without me. Now I feel cheated, as if writing an end to Ella’s story didn’t yield the insight it promised. In some recess of my mind, there is a hidden image, a scene, witnessed and forgotten, that will bring everything back. I want that image and what will follow: cliffs eroding at hyperspeed, everything tumbling into view.
The room with Z in it seems to breathe in and out, inflating and disappearing. The air is sticky and hot. Z is saying something I barely hear. The image is there, almost graspable, but out of reach with Z holding me on the bed like something breakable. I need air. I’m still assuring Z I’m okay and telling him not to follow me when I hear the door shut behind me and see the dizzying steps carpeted in red. I run down two at a time, swinging around each landing, then out into the humid night, through streets where ivy tugs down in thick strands along stone walls lit by the moon. I sit in a cobblestone street under a window box of geraniums, my head between my knees. My breath comes fast, in sobs. Z has narrated so many times the events of that night that I’ve stopped wondering about it. I can almost see it in the darkness: the studio, sheets of glass she hadn’t yet cut. They say she died without pain. There was a leak, probably from one of the canisters she used for metallurgy. The studio blurs out, and I see the greenhouse it has become, where my father grows peppers, tomatoes, and red dahlias because she liked their yellow centers. I want to feel what it was like for her, every thought, impulse, sensation. Did she know? Was there fear, panic, pain, or just terrible sweetness at passing into things, becoming material, no longer responsible, or capable of building or wrecking or hurting or pleasing? A different image darts up: her wall of chisels and hammers, air heavy with debris like fog, pieces of sculptures, dust of breakage, carnage of glass and granite, then flames licking up to swallow the drop cloths. Z has told me nothing of this. It must be my own. My memory.
My thoughts fly, trying to piece it together. Had it been not merely her wish to destroy her sculptures but also her act? Is that what I’d seen? A chemical accident in the studio: too vague. Weak fables leave a nervous scrambling, a scratching of the truth they’ve boarded over.
When her episodes first came on, it wasn’t a problem of not her, but more her, something vigorous in which I delighted, a too-muchness I craved and courted: a mood, a capricious charge in the atmosphere. There was a delighted longing in me each time she sailed off—terror, too, because it wasn’t what I was supposed to feel. The world she saw was chimerical, more alive than our own. When she was returned to us after weeks away, she was frail, medicated. Not her.
Z has told me the story of my missing months enough times over the years that I can picture certain parts: my hospital room with fluorescent lights and flowers that made it junglelike—a botanical garden. My father, not noticing, brought clippings of the first daffodils. When I came home, we would sit on the porch, listening to the breeze and the sounds of birds. Z would tuck me in at night, not staying. When the cherry blossoms bloomed, I started watching films over and over again because it
was the only way I could feel—to see whole lives tucked into hours. I took the parts out of my camera. There were therapists, neurologists, and recommendations to swim and walk, to be outside every day. I want to remember more. My forgetting is the source of all loss.
—Elena! Z’s voice rings out from the shadows.
He sits beside me, breathing hard.
—Why did you run like that? he asks.
—I need you to tell me everything, I say, my voice raw. Was my mother ill before she died? What am I not seeing?
Z sighs, shifts so that we can see each other, badly, in the darkness.
—Nothing full-blown, he says. Your dad played it down. We didn’t want to worry you. Every doctor who treated you advised him not to tell you unless you asked. But you’re wondering if it was really an accident.
I look at him steadily.
—There’s no certainty we’re keeping from you, Elena. Everything I’ve told you is true—at least as I remember it. But we don’t know. We’re probably never going to.
—That’s impossible, I say, fighting down panic, feeling again the tenuousness of the story I’d written for Ella, as Ella.
—Can you just be okay with not knowing? Z asks, pressing his lips together.
The moon is large and light, crossed by thin clouds. I think again of the image—the second one—of fire and debris in the studio.
—What happened to her sculptures? I ask. Did she destroy them?
Z sits up, looks at me carefully.
—No.
I let the image fade, a false memory, but Z is still looking at me strangely.
—Why do you ask?
I tell him about the image. I must be inventing things. I’ve gotten good at it.
—It’s not made up, he says, his voice hoarse. It was you.
His face is all shadows. What he’s saying makes no sense.
—You were scratched up badly, but no burns. You got out before the fire. You cut up your own things, too, prints, negatives. You didn’t know what you’d done. Three months after she died.
I go cold with horror. I remember thinking that if I kept my photographs, I’d go the way she did. If I wrecked them, I’d escape. If I wrecked everything, she might escape, too. It’s hard to breathe.
—I was like her? I ask, my mouth dry, my father’s concern taking on new urgency.
—No, Z says quickly. You knew it was what she wanted. Then June came. You were yourself. It was over.
Z pulls me to him, and we stay pressed together, my tears wetting his face and hair.
After a few minutes, I stand and pull Z up after me, leading him through the narrow streets and down a flight of stone steps. We’re both very hungry. At a brasserie on the rue Caulaincourt, we sit staring at each other until the waiter asks us what we’ll have. Seeing oysters on ice, Z orders a dozen. We can do little but tell stupid jokes. We’re a little stunned, yes, but we can really laugh the way we couldn’t before, when things between us were so heavy.
Eventually, he admits that there is someone in Boston. He hates himself for lying.
—I didn’t want to ruin things between us. What we have is more important than anything. But you grew distant. We never saw each other. I didn’t know what was happening or where we stood. I tried to be there for you, but I felt like I was crowding you.
Z cups his chin in his hands and looks at me. In his face is something like acceptance, submission to something bigger than himself—an expression I never knew how to see.
Affection wells up. I don’t know what to say.
43
HER WORDS WILL COVER THE WALLS. Inhabiting her a last time, I chose a hopeful passage, Ella wondering where the world and she would be in ten years, twenty years. Nothing stays the same when you’re alive, she wrote. Perspective pushes out with the years like the rings in ancient trees; old ways of thinking don’t disappear, but hug the center and seem smaller as the trunk grows wide. Aurelia, at thirty, was ancient, too, she wrote. But Ella would be nearly that old if she were alive. I try to imagine her my age, hair darkened from living in cold cities, pupils too wide in low light, hungry to take it all in, not to miss anything. If she needs a body, I’ll give her mine, to experience things from time to time. I’m calling on her, too, now, a last time. Because the dead with their fixed perspective are good for composing epilogues. It’s because the future is all there in the past, encoded. I believe this. But the future is also how you write the past, so I still have some say. It’s not too late for me. I’m living.
In the loft, I turn on the projector; it awakens, humming, warming under my hand. I wait for Ella’s words to appear in light across the space. Zoë helped make the slides, but it was my idea—to give her some say, she who is fixed now, the heroine tucked too neatly into my slim book, like a guest of Procrustes. Below me in the gallery, the tops of heads are glossy under the lights as people circulate among the photographs and gather in clusters to talk.
Z is standing in front of Loose Boat, his black hair wavy under the gallery lights. He’ll leave soon to catch his train. Ella’s script appears, playing over Z’s dark blazer and the photograph in its frame. Her words are hard to see at first, broken over people and images, but with effort I can make them out. They’re more familiar than my own.
In the journals, Ella quoted Isherwood, not naming him: a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. I’ve become this, too. I’ve become her and the writer she cited. We are all one another, borrowed words and images, webbed together in bands of light.
Soon Siobhán will present the artist’s book. The heads below will turn to look at the pages. They might notice the way the ink has been absorbed by the paper, evenly. They might glance at the press next to the spiral stairs. The book won’t pass into the mind until it has burrowed into the eyes and hands, more thing than idea, sculpture as much as book.
Siobhán cleaves the crowd like an arrow to greet Zoë and the short, charming sculptor who loves to laugh. She guides them to Loose Boat, where Z leans in to hear what she has to say. She shows the photograph, her body moving with new grace. She is back to wearing suits, but her usual gray blazer is paired with jeans. She seems younger somehow, hair swept loosely to one side, fuller lipstick giving her an air that is almost voluptuous. She isn’t the same woman, tight-lipped and exacting, who delivered her proposition so matter-of-factly over a year ago.
Siobhán doesn’t see me here, above her sight line. She hasn’t noticed the projector image. Her hand flies up to beckon Lek, who sidesteps other conversations to make his way toward her, curling his hair around his ear. He checks his impulse to wai, though she would have found this charming. He nods in response to Siobhán, then holds up his cigarettes and moves through the open door, asking a pair of smokers outside for a light. He appears through the glass front, chin down, gray smoke dissolving into the blue night.
He is sturdier than I’d imagined. The Lek in the book is waiflike, barely attached to earth, with long limbs and melancholy features. It was jarring to meet him, days ago, when he arrived, and I spent much of our outing just staring at him. In person, he struck me as both serious and jovial, a joke at the edges of his lips and a playful-mournful gaze, directed always outside himself.
On Lek’s first day in Paris, we walked along the quais from Saint-Michel to the pont de l’Alma. The city showed itself differently with him there; he wanted to know the histories of buildings and to check if the city was really made of light. He made us laugh. He said his wife had been to Paris before, when she was a child, and that she would join us for the opening. He put his hand across his belly to show us she was pregnant.
Siobhán laughed.
In the gallery, I scan the lower floor, trying to identify Lek’s wife. But there are no Thai women, none that I can see. A woman’s voice floats toward me from the base of the stairs.
—You live in London? Aidan asks.
He is the only one in my line of sight.
—We go back to Ch
iang Rai every year. We love it, the voice is saying. I’m sorry about your niece. I knew her very well. We laughed a lot together.
Béa comes into view as she places a hand on Aidan’s arm: sharp, delicate features, thin lips pursed in observation. She is as Ella described her, but the effect of her presence is different. The world around me flickers a moment, as if it weren’t really there.
I look around the gallery: a game of matching people to versions of themselves that may have existed in a different place, in a different time, for someone else.
Siobhán sees me on the ledge and motions. Climbing down the spiral stairs, I join her in front of Loose Boat. Silence spreads through the gallery. Faces turn. Siobhán is speaking. Next to me, Lek blushes. Siobhán is holding the book in her hands, indicating the letterpress. People laugh, responding to her words. But in her voice, I hear only emotion, a frequency to which only I am tuned.
As planned, I read a short passage, an account of Loose Boat. People clap. Lek jokes that he likes the description better than his photograph. Small currents of energy from the crowd make the space feel very full of everything, full of life.
Z approaches with a copy of the artist’s book. He tells me it’s cogent, which from him is high praise. He says he wishes he didn’t have to go, but he has to catch his train. We take his suitcase from the back room, and I walk with him to the boulevard, where the car he called is waiting.
—I’m glad you came, I say.
—It’s strange, he says. I’m proud of you. You feel different.
Every day, there are more moments from my missing time, isolated flashes—lane markers at the local pool, the grass of the front lawn, the yellow shirt Z liked to wear in those days. No longer my proxy memory, Z is Z. Himself. He puts his arms around me and we stay like that until the driver gets out of the car to take his suitcase. Then he is gone, his taillights disappearing, absorbed into the other lights of the boulevard. It feels like the tide rushing out.
Back at the Ormeau, a small band is playing, and faces are warmed by the liquor and lights. In a corner of the gallery, Béa is talking to a woman with short dark hair. Muay’s build. I walk toward them, full of excitement. Then the woman turns, revealing a face that isn’t Thai.
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